Transcript

[Stacey] Welcome to this edition of the Get Untethered Hangout on Air. I am Stacey Harmon and I am here with my co-author of Untethered with Evernote Kristi Willis. We are really excited about today's topic we're going to be talking about going all in and updating to Evernote business. As you probably are aware, Evernote has three tiers of service and this is their business grade that we're going to talk about. This topic isn’t user training. This is for people considering Evernote Business.

We're going to give you some background and parts and pieces that you need in order to successfully understand how to organize Evernote Business and get your users up and running. Kristi and I are both Evernote Ambassadors and Evernote Business Certified Consultant. What an EBCC really means is that we are experts in the business tier of service. A huge part of my job is helping businesses implement Evernote business successfully.

[Kristi] I work with a number of clients, large and small, right now. I’m on a long-term deployment with Whole Foods and working their social media and customer service team. Evernote Business has been a really great way for us to be able to collaborate and coordinate across time zones and between teams.

[Stacey] We've got experience with Evernote Business from a one-person level to a corporate level deployment. Kristi is going to introduce you to why you would consider Evernote Business. Then she’s going to discuss with you several of the features that are different between Evernote Premium and Evernote Business. After she sets the stage and gives you guys some of the parameters you need to know, I’m going to give you some of the tips for deploying Evernote in businesses when starting from scratch. I tend to work with a lot of clients where the principal is an Evernote user that wants to take it to the business level. They are seasoned, but their team might be new, so we’re doing a fresh install.

[Kristi] I was thrilled when Evernote came out with the business product because premium is fabulous, but if you have a bunch of people in a business using Evernote and somebody leaves the business, you could lose the notes and particularly if that departure is not one that everybody was in agreement with. Evernote Business gives you that solution where the business notes live with the company, I have administrative control over who has access to those notes, when they have access to it, and if they depart I can remove them from the account. I can invite people as they join the team. The business notes live with the business and that makes a huge difference. Only admins can delete trash, so if someone deletes something, you still have it.

We also have increased upload limits. If you are bumping up against your 4G, you get an increased upload limit. For those employees that are using Evernote in their personal lives, having Evernote business gives them one workspace for everything. I love it because I can have that personal thought of “I need to create this item” then I can put it in Evernote in my personal notebook, then switch quickly back to my business world. It really gives people that one workspace that they need without having to jump back and forth between two tools.

Here are some of the numbers. In this hangout, we are only talking about the difference between premium and business. If you’re a free user, the jump is even bigger. There’s a great note in Evernote support about the different size limits that are available each of the levels. We're focusing on people who are premium and you already recognize that you want up more storage, more ability, more sharing ability… You can see that there is a big difference, in a premium account I have a hundred thousand notes, whereas in a business account I can have up to 500,000 notes for the company. Those are huge numbers even for me!

I think I only have twelve thousand notes. Stacey how many notes do you have now?

[Stacey] I’m up to 14,000!

[Kristi] She’s ahead of me… those limits are really great as far as the increase. The note storage also goes up. I still get my 4 gig limit for my personal notes plus 2 gig/seat in my business. If you have 10 business users, you’ll have another 20 gigabytes per month in your business notebooks. If you are a notebook person, there’s a 250 notebook limit for premium, but you can have 10,000 company notebooks. I know Stacey was happy to have the extra notebooks.

This is the big one for me: admin control. You have no control over who people are sharing things with from their premium accounts, but with Evernote business you invite people to notebooks, you can still share with people outside the company, but you also can remove those people. You have admin control over who has access to that data. In sharing, in premium, notebooks can be shared individually with Evernote users but they can also be published publicly and this is a big thing for a lot of companies is they do not want any chance that their confidential information can be shared publicly. By going to business, business notebooks cannot be shared publicly. Again, you can still invite people outside the company. I do this all of the time with my notebooks. I invite my clients to a notebook. There's no public publishing of those business notebooks. The final difference is the cost: premium is forty-five dollars per year per user, a business is 10/month/user but what you gain out of the admin control, the number notes and the other benefits… it's definitely worth the investment.

What does business look like? You’ve worked with Evernote premium or Evernote Free Edition. When you join Evernote business you get a whole new place to work from. When I joined Evernote business, in addition to my notebook list, I also now have at the bottom a place to access my business store. My individual company is called KWS Solutions Group. When I go and click on that, I start to see my business layout. Initially where I land is the people in my business. I’m a small shop, it’s me and Lillian.

You can see in that dashboard view how many notebooks there are, how many people have joined, etc. I can also see here my business notebooks; I can start to see a list of those notebooks, how many notes are in each and how many people have joined them. Technically I’m publishing things and Lillian is joining. This is a dashboard that from within the Evernote client, any business user is going to be able to see. They can look for people, or look for business notebooks from the Evernote desktop client.

I can also invite coworkers to collaborate. Anyone on the team can invite coworkers, but admins get approval. For example, with the Whole Foods team, they have been adding people to the customer service team, so the customer service team leader has been requesting that new people be added. She can invite anyone and then as an admin I get a notice that there are people who need approval. That’s nice because you as the admin don't have to track down every new hire, you can have the team leads be in charge of that. When I want to go in and administer the Evernote Business store or users, I can do that through the admin console. The way that you get there is part of the web client. Either from your desktop app, go to Help then Admin Console, or you can log in to the Evernote web client and choose Admin Console at the bottom.

This is where I can manage my users, my notebooks and my billing. I’m using my personal out of client privilege, using my personal store to show the example. It’s a small number of users, but you get an idea for how it is laid out. Then I can go into the individual parts of the admin console and work more with what I need to do for my team. You have two setups for adding users: one is that you can add any user with that domain. So KWSolutionsGroup.com, any user with that domain would automatically be able to join my company. We did not set up this for the small 15 person team that I’m working with at Whole Foods, because there are 85,000 employees at Whole Foods. That would have been a bit excessive for that team’s budget.

What we chose to do instead was add team members individually. Either the team lead can do that, or I can as an admin. You also can manage your users from here, you can go and determine their role. I just have one admin, but for the team at Whole Foods, I actually set up 3 admins so that if one person is unavailable, one of the other admins could go in and administer the users or notebooks as needed. You also can determine the status and you can set up two-step verification so that it requires a second step to be able to log in. So if you have highly sensitive data, this would be really important. The team at Whole Foods is not working with a lot of sensitive data, so we’re okay with single-step verification. If I was working with a legal or financial team or an HR team where there might be a great deal sensitive information, I would definitely set up that two-step verification.

If there are users who have requested access but they haven't been signed off on, they will appear in this top piece and you can just choose to accept them or not. I can also administer the business notebooks from here. I can go in and determine who they’re shared with and how many members there are. For example you can see on that top notebook, we're working on a cookbook right now, there are three members, because our photographer is part of that notebook. You can see exactly how many members there are, etc. Not all notebooks need to be shared through the business. I only need access to a couple of notebooks like financial things.

It is important when you create a business notebook, it is hidden from everybody else until it is shared with the business. Stacey's going to talk a little bit more about that but you do want to make sure that for notebooks that you want other people to be able to join them you have made them available to join. The new processes is that you create the notebook and then you come into the admin console to be able to share that out.

You can also administer the business tags from here and clean tags up. You can tell how many notes have been assigned tags. Any tags that everyone needs to be able to use, you can go in and check those and administer them from here. Finally, you can administer the trash from here. When people delete things, they are going to go into the trash and they will stay until you clear it out. I’m not a very good trash emptier. I can go in and individually delete notes or as a whole. But you can always restore it if needed.

That is what the Evernote Business admin console looks like; again it's a web-based tool and you can get to it through the desktop through choosing Help>Admin Console or logging into the web client. Stacey captured this great graphic for us because from a day-to-day uses standpoint… when you have a business it does separate out your business and your personal notes. When you're in the different clients. On the Mac, those are listed alphabetically, and on the PC they are separated into personal and business notebooks. This is also how they are separated on the mobile apps.

If you’re using multiple clients it can be a little confusing the first time you go to look for something and you’re in the wrong set of notebooks. Just like you would have two file cabinets in real life and then go and look for the notebook.

[Stacey] From a user education perspective this is a really important point right here is that depending on if they’re on a Mac or PC the order with which their notebooks appear in their client will be different. It can impact naming conventions which is something that we will discuss.

[Kristi] I will say, I panicked a little the first time I went to find something on my mobile app on my iPad, and I went to find a notebook and it wasn’t on the list. I had to take a step back and remember the different lists.

[Stacey] It's definitely a step up that you want to consider when you’re deploying Evernote Business. You need to comprehend that there’s a personal and business side to the account. Once users grasp that they see the power in it and it comes very functional.

Those are the foundations and you really have to understand those as the person who is bringing Evernote into your organization. I do want to bring up one point, you use specify the importance of having two admins, if you have a larger organization it is absolutely critical to decide who are going to be your admins. I had a horror story with a client who had his assistant be the only admin, and when she not pleasantly left the organization, she took all the rights with her.

It's an important role, you want to think through it especially if you’re a larger organization. That would be my word of caution as you go towards Evernote Business. Now I’m going to take some time and go through some of my lessons and process for starting fresh with Evernote Business in your organization. The scenario here is that you’re probably a current user or you think that Evernote Business is going to be the way you want to go because of the admin control and data ownership, so we’re starting with a fresh install. This is the process that I go through with clients. I think there's really four big phases. I’m going to conceptually lay out what's going to make for the most successful deployment for you without going into too much detail.

You really need to have clarity on your workflow, you need to set up the software, you need to do some admin and user training, and make sure that you have a process for documentation and management. If you are a small shop, all of this stuff can happen pretty quickly. It can happen concurrently and it doesn't have to be complex. When you get up into a ten or twenty or fifty person deployment, these types of things become far more important to have solidified and understood so that you are creating a solution that scalable and will work for all your users.

The amount of time that you take and the formality with which you go through these things can vary greatly depending on the size of the organization as well as the skill set of the users that are involved and the handle that you have on your personal existing processes. With the rest of my time, I’m just going to give you a few tips within each of these categories.

Let’s talk about best practices for workflow and design. Let’s start with best practices in category 1: workflow clarity and design. This is going to be about things such as you know where should my data live? There is no right or wrong if it should all be in Evernote. Some companies it should, some it should be split. You want to be considering who needs access to what and what kinds of sharing privileges and rights people need.

You also want to consider naming conventions. All of these things are going to impact your design and your workflow deployment. Here's an example, a lot of people will have data on a server already. Simply looking at that and deciding what data should be in Evernote is a best practice. It’s good to step back and evaluate what your current processes are. This is something I go through with more robust appointments. We document current workflows: who’s involved, what are we doing currently so that we can better insert Evernote.

You can also approach it more simply. Instead of working from the ground up, you might already have a solidified process. Some of my clients already have a very defined structure to how they organize their data. We were able to replicate that in Evernote very easily. The other best practice is, both Kristi and I are huge on deciding naming conventions. It becomes even more important when you get into the business tier of the the software and this is because of this business home that Kristi oriented you to.

When you have naming conventions it provides a logical grouping that makes sense to your users and it provides structure to your shared workspaces that Evernote business provides. The challenge is you need to decide what your naming conventions are going to be. It’s good to track the unit you want to track in your business, then use that in your naming convention.

[Kristi] I would say that that's really important; stacks are personal, so creating a stack doesn't translate to other users. So that naming convention becomes really important for people to be able to hone in on grouping and then they can create a stack if they want to to organize their netbooks in a certain way. You can't create a stack for everybody. Those naming conventions create that grouping in the full notebook store so people can then group them the way they want to in their personal view.

[Stacey] The next section is software setup. Best practices for setting up the software in general this is talking about what Kristi oriented you to at the beginning. Here's a couple of more detailed tips that I like to advise people on. The first is to really make sure that if your users that you invite into the system are an existing Evernote users, when they sign up for business, they’ll get an email, they want to choose “use an existing account” here. They don’t want to sign up for a second Evernote account. They certainly can but they’re going to have a much more pleasant experience if they merge their two accounts.

This displays both personal and business in the same interface. Personal notes are still the same, and if they move on, they will keep their personal notes with them. The other thing is I like to advocate that you allocate at least an hour per user to do a general device setup for them. This involves things like installing the desktop client and the mobile client on all their devices. Installing and configuring the Web Clipper and making sure that Skitch and other third party apps like Scannable are installed.

You’ve gone through all of the preferences are set up. Make sure that “Sync” is set to the lowest amount of time so you can collaborate effectively. These things will minimize user frustration as they use Evernote. Kristi and I are going to do an entire hour on our preferences that really matter to us in next month’s hangout.

[Kristi] If you’re working with a large company, I would create a deployment team and have one person in charge of a group of users to make sure that the group of users gets everything installed correctly. Just give them a check list. A small team is easier to do one on one, but with a larger team, just create a team to get everybody installed.

[Stacey] The next user thing that I really like to advocate is to make sure that each user has an Inbox-Personal and an Inbox-Business. This is renaming your default personal notebook, and renaming your business notebook as well. Putting the “.” There helps it sort to the top. This creates a wire in-basket for all users to have some sort of visual organization structure right off the bat. Both of these places will be private or personal to the user, they won’t be shared or published to the business library.

Best practices for admin and user training. You want to be sure that all of your admins understand the admin panel. You want to build in training for your Evernote users and then process training as well. One of the key things that I think we need to consider here is really making sure your users understand Business Notebook behavior. When they understand the concepts on this slide, everything becomes easier. Be sure to include in your training the understanding privacy vs. ownership.

Kristi helped introduce us to this. A notebook is a personal workspace for the user. It’s not shared immediately or visible to the business. However, if you create a business notebook, they own it. If they leave, the admin has the ability to reassign the notes in that notebook to a new employee. The intellectual property and processes are retained with the business. On the personal side of Evernote, privacy and ownership are one in the same.

When you are on the personal side and you want to leave a notebook, it says “delete” but on the business side it says “leave.” As a business user, you can’t really delete it. Stack organization is also very important. Stacks are user specific. You can organize notebooks however you like and when users understand that, it make things clearer. When admins understand that, it makes things clearer as well. A common question is “How do I make everyone’s system look the same?” If you’re interested in having notebooks organized the same, you need to do a recommended organization for your users.

As your users get savvy with Evernote, they will realize they can organize their own way. You also want to understand sharing behavior in notebooks. One key point is that you need to adopt as a best practice is not to rename notebooks after they've been shared. Whether you’re sharing with an individual or publishing it to the business home, don’t rename a notebook. Evernote’s behavior is that the notebook rename won’t be pushed to the other users. They won’t be notified. This is a new concept for business users: publishing notebooks. Here are some nuances about that and best strategies that I coach on. This is a lot about the business home that Kristi introduced you to.

You can see here that there's actually a process. There are two sides to notebooks. When you're in what's called “business home” which is your new business element. You have the opportunity to view people and notebooks. When you go to the business notebooks, you'll see a list of all of the notebooks that you have access to. All of the notebooks that the administrator or users have published to the business home. Any user can go in and join a notebook. They can join or leave them at any time. When I go to the HE business home and go to the business notebooks, the top notebook does not say “Joined.” That means I can still add it to my own account. If I’ve joined them, they will show up in my tree structure on the left. If I want to add a notebook to my account, I simply join is with this button here.

If I am a user and I want to create a notebook that can be accessed by my team and collaborated on. I created this strategy with my smaller teams: create, publish, push. This is the way to insure to train users that when they are creating a notebook meant to be published, and you want other people in your account to join, you should create, publish, push. They reason I have this is because as you can see here, this requires each individual user to go in and proactively join a notebook. One challenge is that if I create a new notebook that I want my assistant to join, I have to go and tell her to join it. The reality is it's possible to push a new notebook that you’ve created to other members of your team. The process would be, create a new notebook in my business account, then I’m going to publish it, then take the extra step and push it to the people that they want to collaborate with. Go to your business home, go to people, choose the person who you want to push the notebook to, and you then can choose to invite them to notebooks. What this will do is make sure that the notebook gets pushed into their account so that they can see new notebooks that have been created. They also will receive an email. If it not longer becomes relevant to them, they can certainly leave it. This is a great way to train your users to create, publish, push.

[Kristi] If you're the admin, you can also go into the admin console and invite people to the notebook from there. If you’re the admin creating notebooks, you don’t have to go to each individual user. You also could use work chat to share a notebook out to people. If you need to share that notebook with multiple people and you don't want to have to go to each individual user through the business dashboard, then you can still share it out through Work Chat.

[Stacey] Moving on to the fourth and final best practice phase: process documentation and management. The tip here really is to just do it. It’s important to have it down. This is so that you can make sure you have consistency amongst how people are working within the system. What I suggest is that you simply use an Evernote note to log your Evernote Business and process rules. Maybe create a notebook called Evernote Rules and write those things down. What are your process notes? What are the naming conventions?

Now Kristi is going to tell us about her experience and best practices for when you migrate people who are already using Evernote on a personal basis into Evernote Business.

[Kristi] The first several Evernote Business deployments I did were people who had limited Evernote users. The most recent deployment that I've helped with on the direct marketing team at Whole Foods, they were all using Evernote in their business operations but as premium users. When I joined in, I talked to their leader about the risk that it put us at. They were using it quite a bit and they were in transition where people were moving around in the company. We decided that it was best for the 16 person team to start using Evernote Business so that the notes stayed with the business even if the people moved to different positions.

It's a little bit different when you have existing premium users because what they've been doing is they have been creating notebooks in their premium personal store and then sharing them with each other but there's no map of how that works. The very first thing that I had to do was figure out who was sharing what with whom. Let me tell ya, that was a little bit of a maze. I tried initially doing this through a survey, but really figured out that I needed to sit down with each person.

I really had to understand their current system in order to help move them into new notebooks in Evernote business. This marketing team is actually three separate teams under one umbrella. Therefore members were doing some things differently, and I had to even out that structure. The big thing was going in and figuring out who had what when.

Then the other things that I would mention here that are just a little bit different then when you're starting from scratch is that in addition to figuring out that maze of what notebook structure we needed, was creating a time and a set of processes to move the notes from premium to business. We needed to get them out of those premium notebooks into the business notebooks. I taught everybody how to do that, and then we set a deadline.

I also created transition workshops for them. There were people who had never used Evernote, so for them I did an Evernote 101. For the people that had been using premium I did a separate set of workshops really about this is what's different now, and how you move around in business and what can be different for you. I also did some level study; some of them were using the Clipper, some weren’t. I made sure everyone knew how to use the correct tools. you seen and Clippers love them weren't so make sure that everybody knew how

Really make sure you have a project manager to help the transition, document and train. This was really important to me. As the EBCC on the team, I was the project manager, but within the three teams, there was one champion on each team who helped support the integration of Evernote into the business. If it’s not within your resources to hire an EBCC, just make sure that someone is empowered to be that champion for your team. Tools don’t solve problems. It’s using them right during your day-to-day practice in the business that solves the challenge so having the champions for that is going to be really really important.

[Stacey] That is exactly right. Often that champion is the one who decided to bring Evernote to the business. If that’s you and you’re the principal and you have a lot of other tasks, bringing in a consultant to help you doesn’t have to be a long-term proposition, it can be a deployment issue only. One of the benefits of Evernote is that it is so user friendly. When that system is setup properly, it really can run itself. Having someone to help you understand makes this a very effective and affordable solution for your business.